President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party spent this week “trying to recreate a world that doesn’t exist,” Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus tells Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.

“This race is going to come down to some fundamental things: Are people better off today than they were four years ago and did the president fulfill the mission of his presidency?” Priebus tells Newsmax. “People are forgiving, and people are generally filled with a fair amount of grace when it comes to politicians.

“However, if you can’t point to some of your most basic promises and show that the missions have been completed, I can’t imagine how anybody’s going to go into this final closing argument thinking that we need four more years of this misery.”

Watch our exclusive interview. Story continues below.

Priebus said Obama’s acceptance speech on Thursday at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., conveyed a “sort of a fantasy-land rendition of where we are in this country” — and that was undone on Friday with the disclosure of the national unemployment rate of 8.1 percent for August.

Only 96,000 jobs were added last month, the government reported, and the overall rate fell from 8.3 percent in July only because more people stopped looking for work. People who are out of work are counted as unemployed only if they are searching for a job.

“What it shows is that the Democrats aren’t living on Earth,” Priebus said. “Only 63.5 percent of people who are eligible to work are actively looking for work. That’s the lowest number in decades. And of that number, 8.1 percent of those people can’t find work.

“What you saw this morning was that almost the equivalent of the entire city of Tampa threw up their arms and said, ‘This economy is so bad that I’m not even going to bother looking for work.’ Chronic unemployment in this country is at a level that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.”

And this is why the president must not be re-elected, Priebus said.

“President Obama ran in 2008 based on a tough economy. He ran on the economy. He ran against Bush, and he said that he would fix the economy that we’re in now. He ran based on his own explanation of confidence and ability to fix the situation we were in — and he won because the economy had to be fixed and he promised he would do it.

“People care about the fact that what we need in politics are people of their word to run for office, and then we need them to govern the way that they’ve campaigned,” he added. “That’s his biggest problem. He has not governed in the way that he campaigned four years ago.”

Looking to the fall campaign, Priebus said the GOP is going to spend its money on “the ground operation.”

“I’m a believer in crushing your opponent on the ground: door to door, neighborhood to neighborhood and absentee ballot programs. The Democrats have nothing on us when it comes to the ground operation. Their ground game doesn’t stack up to us at all.

“The only way to win this election is on the ground, so our money — the vast majority of RNC money that is stockpiled — is for the ground game to make sure we hit our goals and exceed our goals in communities and neighborhood across America,” Priebus added. “We have the technology and the personnel up and down to get this done – and that’s what my focus is on.

“The airwaves are going to be saturated. It all will come down to door-to-door and the ground game.”

In his exclusive Newsmax interview, Priebus also:

Defended GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney on attacks of not paying tribute to veterans in his acceptance speech last week. The former Massachusetts governor visited a VFW Post in Indiana the day before his Tampa speech. “We had multiple tributes to the troops and we can’t thank them enough.”

Rebuffed Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who said a “technical oversight” led to the omissions of God and support for Israel from the Democratic Party platform. “There’s no way it wasn’t intentional. There is no such thing as a technical error of removing Jerusalem and God from your platform.”

Noted that the GOP is doing better in appealing to women voters because they, in particular, “understand the household situations out there — and they understand the economic impact of Barack Obama’s policies. Now, we need to hone in for the next two months to continue pounding away on what the truth is.”

Attacked the liberal mainstream media for not being fair in its coverage to both presidential candidates. “I still think there is a pretty big love affair with Obama, but the facts are on our side — and there is nothing better that walking in to that closing argument with the facts on your side.”